The legend of Sonny Lubick: How a fired CSU football coach remains a Fort Collins icon

Once fired by Colorado State football, Lubick has transcended his success on the field because of how well he treats people.

Kelly Lyell, Fort Collins Coloradoan

Several of the football players Sonny Lubick coached at Colorado State will tell you that even today, they would run through a brick wall for him if he asked.

They trust him, love him, revere him.

It's not really about how he put CSU on the nation's college football map in his 15 seasons with the Rams.

It's because of the man he is.

Authentic, caring, compassionate.

“He’s a genuine human being,” former CSU running back Kevin McDougal said. “What you see is what you get. He’s the same every time you interact with him. And he’s selfless; the conversation is always directed toward you. You can’t help but love the guy.”

'He was a great guiding light'

McDougal, now a Fort Collins real estate agent with a family of his own, said Lubick was "tremendously influential in my life" and the lives of his teammates. He was a father figure for many players who didn't have a father at home, and he never wavered in his beliefs and teachings.

Sonny Lubick reads 'The Wolf is Coming' to children and parents at a Read-Aloud Day event in 2001.Rich Abrahamson, Coloradoan library

"He was tough on you, but he was loving," McDougal said. "He was caring. He'd push you, but he'd give you a hug when you needed it. He was always the same; you knew what you were going to get from him. That was really nice to have, especially growing up and trying to become a young man.

"He was a great guiding light for a lot of us."

Those character traits have allowed Lubick to transcend football to become a living legend in Fort Collins well after CSU fired him in 2007 after three straight losing seasons.

Today, nobody really remembers those three bad seasons. Those who do realize how inconsequential they are to Lubick's legacy.

“His impact on the Northern Colorado community, as a whole, is immeasurable because he became an icon,” said Gary Ozzello, who worked for 35 years in CSU's athletic department before taking his current role as university director of community outreach and engagement. “He did what no one thought possible to do here in terms of sustained success. But more important was who he was in the community. He was Joe Everyman.”

CSU recently hired its fourth football coach since Lubick's ouster in naming former Boston College coach Steve Addazio to the job. None of the others — Steve Fairchild, Jim McElwain or Mike Bobo — scratched the surface of making the kind of mark on the Fort Collins community that Lubick has.

Former CSU football coach Sonny Lubick's legacy in Fort Collins goes well beyond the game

The legendary Colorado State football coach transcends the game because of who he was and how he treated people — on and off the field.

Kelly Lyell, kellylyell@coloradoan.com

Leading in the community and the classroom

At a time in his life when most people would be slowing down, the 82-year-old Lubick is still moving full-speed ahead.

In 2015, CSU announced it would change the moniker of its on-campus stadium field to bear Sonny Lubick's name.Valerie Mosley, Coloradoan library

Lubick is pretty certain, in fact, he’d be a better football coach now, given all he’s learned since leaving the game 12 years ago.

“I wish to hell I could go back; I’d be so much better with people and coaches, with players — way better,” he said.

Today, Lubick serves as the director of community leadership for CSU’s business school, where he co-teaches a class on leadership. He visits other classrooms frequently as a guest lecturer and keeps regular office hours most weekday mornings.

He has an afternoon job, too, at Canvas Credit Union, where he serves as director of community outreach.

A steakhouse in Old Town bears his name, as does the playing field at Canvas Stadium. He even lent his face as a model to the artist who designed the bronze sculpture of a man wearing a ram’s head and riding a bicycle on the stadium’s New Belgium Porch.

“He likes to be involved and likes to keep going, and he’s in great shape and great health, so why not?” said his daughter, Michelle Boyle. “Otherwise, he’d just drive my mom crazy. He doesn’t know how to do home repairs; he’d probably make it worse. I think it’s great that he’s doing the things that he can do.”

Sonny Lubick

I wish to hell I could go back; I’d be so much better with people and coaches, with players — way better.

Quote icon

Lubick's oldest son, Matt, coached for many years at the college level before stepping down from his coaching position at Washington last fall to return to Fort Collins, also working at Canvas Credit Union. His younger son, Marc, is an assistant coach in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills. So Sonny has stayed on top of the game, looking over film with them and attending their games with his wife, Carol Jo, for the past dozen years.

Sonny is “a voracious reader,” Canvas CEO Todd Marksberry said, and learns more every day, he said, about how to be a better leader.

Lubick's road to the CSU Rams

Although Sonny’s coaching career took him from California to Florida to Colorado, he wore his blue-collar Montana upbringing everywhere.

He still does, Michelle said.

Sonny Lubick runs as player Jamie Amicarella tries to give him a celebratory ice bath. Lubick led the Rams to six conference championships and nine bowl games.Sherri Barber, Coloradoan library

“He’s got those Butte, Montana, roots," she said. "My grandfather was a miner, and my dad is like the most down-to-earth guy you’d ever meet. Whether he’s the head coach of a highly successful (college football program) or when he started his first job in Beatty, Nevada, driving a school bus and coaching 8-man football and girls basketball, he never changed.

“He always taught us the Golden Rule; treat people the way you want to be treated, and then he lives out his life like that each and every day.”

Sonny’s father, Matthew “Doc” Lubick, started working in the copper mines in Butte before completing high school. He would go underground to work before dawn and return home after sunset. He’d often have to ask Sonny and his three siblings what the weather had been like because he rarely got to see for himself.

“They didn’t have much; that’s for darned sure,” Michelle said. “My dad used to sleep at the end of their bed; he didn’t have his own bed for a long time.”

Sonny speaks glowingly of his parents and the values they instilled in him and his three siblings. A strong work ethic, respect for others, honesty, integrity, compassion and humility.

“He’s such a genuine guy; he’s like a grandfather,” longtime CSU volleyball coach Tom Hilbert said. “He’s so kind, and he’s not conceited. He doesn’t raise his nose at anything.”

Or anyone.

Ozzello said Sonny knew the janitors by name at the McGraw Athletic Center, where the CSU football team’s offices were when he was coaching, and asked about their families often. He always made sure they had tickets to home games.

Sonny coached high school football back in Butte for eight years and spent 11 years on the staff at Montana State, the last three as the head coach. He first came to CSU in 1982 as an assistant under Leon Fuller, and then worked as an assistant at Stanford under Jack Elway — the father of Denver Broncos legend John Elway — and as the defensive coordinator under Dennis Erickson at Miami.

Sonny Lubick's coaching career:

1960-61 — Beatty (Nevada) High School, head coach

1962-67 — Butte (Montana) High School, assistant coach

1968-69 — Butte High School, head coach

1970-77 — Assistant coach, Montana State

1978-81 — Head coach, Montana State

1982-84 — Offensive coordinator, Colorado State

1985-88 — Assistant coach, Stanford

1989-92 — Defensive coordinator, Miami

1993-2007 — Head coach, Colorado State

In his four seasons at Miami, where he helped the Hurricanes win two national championships, Sonny coached Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and future NFL stars Cortez Kennedy and Russell Maryland.

The highs and lows of Lubick's tenure

When he returned to CSU in 1993 as the Rams' head coach, he didn’t necessarily expect to have the success he did.

"I didn't have a four-year or five-year plan; I don't believe in those things," Sonny said. "It really goes day to day, you work the best you can. When I came here, CSU was not great. I was here eight years earlier, and, heck, if you won three or four or five games, that was a great thing. People just enjoyed going to games. Most of them didn't even care who was playing or what was going on.

"I think CSU might have been ripe, Fort Collins might have been ripe. We were just starting to grow up a little bit. I don't know, there was something about it. I think the overall area had nowhere to go but up."

Sonny led the Rams to six conference championships and nine bowl games. His CSU teams were ranked in the Top 25 eight times in his first 11 seasons, and he was at the helm when the Rams earned their only wins ever over teams ranked in the Top 10 — Arizona in 1994 and Colorado in 2002.

His overall record at CSU was 108-74, and he was 80-40 in league play.

“We got here; we got lucky,” he said. “We had good coaches and then won some games. It surprised myself; it surprised everybody. I still pinch myself. I told the coaches, ‘Don’t wake up and start coaching. Let it go the way it is.’”

Sonny Lubick directs his team during a home game in 1996.Coloradoan library

Lubick's lasting legacy

That success certainly didn’t change Sonny, and it's one of the reasons he's so beloved.

“You can be with him on the street, and you walk down the street and invariably you can’t make it a block without somebody stopping and saying something to Coach and, of course, they call him ‘Sonny,’” Marksberry said. “And he acts and treats everybody like he’s known them his entire life. &mldr; Every interaction I see Coach have with people — of all ages, all backgrounds, all walks of life — he treats them like they’re family. And I think that’s his humility and his authenticity. He’s about as authentic a person as you can find.”

He has a “special gift,” Michelle said, for focusing on whoever he is talking to at the time and remembering names and other important details about them that he brings up whenever they cross paths again.

One of Ozzello’s favorite stories about Sonny was when the coach asked if he could hitch a ride back with Ozzello from a fundraising golf tournament in Yuma, on Colorado’s Eastern Plains.

Ozzello had driven three assistant basketball coaches to the event and said it would be crowded fitting five in his Ford sedan for the 2½-hour drive back to Fort Collins.

Sonny, he said, volunteered to sit in the middle-back seat, or "the hump," and insisted they stop at a convenience story on the way out of town so he could buy snacks — peanuts and popcorn — to share.

“The crazy thing was I’m driving down Highway 14 for 2½ hours, and I’m seeing our head coach, who’s now already won two WAC championships and been in the Top 25, in the back seat on the hump in my rearview mirror,” Ozzello said. “And I’m thinking, ‘I wonder if Steve Spurrier would be doing this.’”

That's who Sonny is. He doesn't like people to make a big deal about him or treat him any differently than anybody else. He'll probably hate this story. He's just someone who had a job to do, did it to the best of his ability and caught a few breaks along the way.

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He was aghast when his name was first put on the playing field at Hughes Stadium as a condition of a $15.2 million gift to the university in 2004 from local philanthropist Pat Stryker, saying such honors were only appropriate for people who had died (A separate donation, $20 million from an anonymous source in 2016, was made to put his name on the playing field at Canvas Stadium for 30 years).

And this past September, during a special premiere screening of Altitude Sports' documentary on Sonny's life, Sonny and Matt slipped out quietly before the end.

"Typical Sonny," Marksberry said at the time. "He didn't want to be around for everybody to make a fuss over him. He doesn't like that."

Louis Matthew 'Sonny' Lubick

Sonny Lubick waves to fans as he leaves the field after a win against Wyoming in 2007. Three days later, CSU announced his firing.V. Richard Haro, Coloradoan library